Has search gotten worse?

[Stasi]

One thing I've noticed recently that has been annoying me is the prevalence of youtube videos in search results on Google.

Used to be you would click on the 'video' button if thats what you are after or hell go to actual youtube. I dont want 3 pages of nothing but youtube links on my Google search.

 

[Bubbly Sink]

If i'm looking for something like "Nigger wojak" I use duckduckgo
if i'm looking for images of "M1 Abram tank" i'll use google.
if i want to plant trees, i'll use ecosia.

smaller search engines have more niche results, bigfags have broad and somewhat good results. it's a case by case basis for me.

 

[Toolbox]

Advertisement, SEO abuse, and just general censorship by search aggregators have run absolutely rampant over the past several years. It doesn't help that terrible mass media conglomerates are favored by major search engine companies, especially Google.

 

[Dick Justice]

And don't get me started on how the Google Image search function was completely fucked in 2018 when Google kowtowed to Getty Images. That still pisses me off.

?
I'd do a search for the story, but...

 

[The Littlest Shitlord]

Yes, because all search engines - the big ones and smaller, single-site ones - are now expected to be "Googly". As in, the engine is supposed to know what you mean even if you don't know what you mean. Instead of relying on the user to punch in exactly what he's looking for and treating a search engine as an inverse index, (archive) it has become expected that every vague keyword is to expanded to mean more than what you typed based on context, that being other keywords in the query or based on some external knowledge on who the user is.

Being able to read the user's mind is great and everything but it opens dozens of avenues to fuck up even the simplest search query because computers are braindead. So unless you are Google and have everyone's information it means you have to do it in aggregate and make a best effort and hope the individual's vague query is close to the average on what the engine determines it to be.

Since we let retards onto the internet, though, that means if you actually do know what you want, ask for it specifically, and it's not on the radar of the average moron, you're likely to get a poor result. And that's discounting any tampering the engine might be doing anyway.

This! It's become nearly impossible to do any actual serious searching these days, because every single fucking search engine treats my search term as a mere suggestion by a retard. I'll routinely get tons of results where one or more of the search terms are completely missing, and tons more where the search engine substituted something sort of related or with a similar spelling for one or more terms, and there is no way to turn this bullshit off. Keep in mind that by "related", it can be anything up to "these two terms are direct opposites".

I think that it's largely a result of one of the worst features of capitalism, where everyone mindlessly chases the single largest market segment (in this case, complete retards who don't really know what they are looking for) and smaller market segments are always underserved, along with one of the worse features of human nature where everyone mindlessly follows the market leader because they wouldn't be the market leader if they didn't know what they are doing, right?

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

I've noticed that too just as someone trying to troubleshoot tech issues. Search engines seem to prioritize the "official" support forums whenever possible, where any thread on technical issues is lots of replies like "I have that problem too" before the thread is locked by a janny.

Or the OP makes an edit that says the dreaded words. "Nevermind. Fixed it." These monsters never share how it was fixed.

 

[Toolbox]

?
I'd do a search for the story, but...

I believe this is mentioning how Google removed the "view image" button entirely after Getty Images filed a suit against them. Then, a few years later, they partnered in an image licensing deal. The view images button is still gone, though, because it enabled a user to avoid the original webpage thus giving no traffic to the image host. Incredibly hypocritical of Getty to be filing suits like this over "their property" when they apparently will rehost public domain images as if they somehow own them. Google also recently gutted an image search feature that allowed the easy search of images that had free use creative commons licenses. Google continues to make their services ever more useless.

 

[Aidan]

I don't think search itself has gotten worse, but Google absolutely has and is increasingly less useful. It's to the point where I use different search engines depending on what I'm searching for.

Google still the best for tech things in my experience but questionable-to-useless for everything else.

 

[Tookie]

Yes. Search results have become increasingly littered with clickbait, pop culture trash, and "journalist" puff pieces that obscure the first party sources you might be looking for.

 

[Rei is shit]

I do a lot of searching for very specific and technical things. Google is completely fucking useless now. Bing and yandex though will actually pull up the sort of results I want.

Oh and how the fuck has pinterest managed to seo itself so well? I once did a search that was time-range limited on google to before 2000 and still had fucking pinterest pop up in the results, even though that pos company was founded in 2010.

 

[Tovarisz]

Google has peaked around 2014 maybe a little earlier than that and has only been getting worse since then. I used to be able to find obscure as shit things based on paste/copy of excerbs from ancient readme files, that is now borderline impossible.

Political climate post 2016 has completely fucked up the ability to find any news relating to current events from anyone or anything but mainstream media sources.

Various privacy laws created to essentially protect people from their own idiocy and oversharing make it impossible to search for people by name even if they're a somewhat public figure or used to depend on their name for their content to be found.

Fear of linking to some extremist website had google derank just about every single forum that had answers to simple issues leaving only the biggest ones that have the most retarded, woke jannies.

Image search is worthless due to reasons people mentioned above.

Good Torrent sites are nearly completely blacklisted, leaving mostly weird clones and forks that I'm sure are filled with nothing but malware.

Also the algorithm has been trained to be woke and search results often serve little more purpose than to find refutations of anything even a centrist would say and confirmation bias for leftists.

Most results are obviously sponsored or paid for in some way, a simple search for some item will rarely get you hardware manufacturer's website with proper description and drivers, you'll first have to scroll through 20+ options to buy it from storefronts you never knew existed.

There are no truly good alternatives, I wish I could have 2010-2014 Google that didn't try to protect me from myself and presume to know better than me what it is I'm looking for.

 

[melty]

In a lot of ways, yes. I've increasingly resorted to adding "reddit" to a lot of my searches queries because otherwise, I'll end up on some shitty old or nu media site written by someone stroking their ego and shilling a bunch of products that doesn't what they're talking about.

In particular, this is a problem when searching for things like beauty or skincare products. Every first page result will be some braindead women's magazine writer who views the magazine as her personal blog. Some of them don't even try the fucking things and will write shit like "I forgot to use today's product because I was in such a rush to get to Amanda's baby shower (so exciting!). But look at that ah-mazing packaging! Buy here at Amazon"
So I tag reddit onto the search because at least that way you can find people who have used the thing and have a halfway intelligent write up of it's pros and cons, which paid journalists can't seem to handle doing. The obvious downside here is that it's reddit and people who use reddit, but it's still better than the top search results.

The search situation with recipes is just getting worse, despite being somewhat commonly mocked. And something I've found annoying lately is that the dated search feature on Google doesn't work well. If I try searching for something like "Epstein" in the date range of 2006-2007, I get a bunch of articles about recent Epstein stuff because some article from 2006 will have populated on its page the latest news stories but it somehow shows up as being from 2006 anyway. I'm torn between viewing this as a conspiracy and thinking it's just shitty and they don't feel the need to develop this area of search.

I just miss the old internet. Everything was better when the people making websites were doing it because they were spergs who wanted to share information, not media shills who google decided were trusted sources. Sometimes I think I should go back to navigating it mainly by collections of links posted by people on their personal websites.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Google becoming worse has been a boon for Microsoft. There's no reason not to Bing anymore, with a shot of Yandex on the side.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I believe this is mentioning how Google removed the "view image" button entirely after Getty Images filed a suit against them. Then, a few years later, they partnered in an image licensing deal. The view images button is still gone, though, because it enabled a user to avoid the original webpage thus giving no traffic to the image host. Incredibly hypocritical of Getty to be filing suits like this over "their property" when they apparently will rehost public domain images as if they somehow own them. Google also recently gutted an image search feature that allowed the easy search of images that had free use creative commons licenses. Google continues to make their services ever more useless.

It was a complete non-issue as well, the functionality was never actually removed.

What's worse is that they're previewing images on the right side of the screen instead of in the middle like they used to. It fucks everything up. Not long ago for reasons I can't understand the "page back" button on the mouse suddenly opened links if the cursor was over one in the image tab.

 

[100%black]

That depends on what era you're comparing it to. Back in 2000 when I first had a connection, searches were fucking garbage and barely ever worked. In the later 2000s, there was a golden period of accuracy and being able to find almost anything. Then sponsors started to come first, giant sites took precedent over accurate results, and filtering snuck in. Duckduckgo is fine, but it has great troubles finding things put up pre 2008.

 

[ditto]

Also, the reverse image search sucks balls now.

Google image search went from hashing the image and searching for locations of it, to some machine learning classifier BS. It would even work with cropped or scaled images, and find a higher quality version of the same image. Now if you upload a photo of a person it'll pass it to its lobotomized AI and return "Human Male" and a bunch of stock photos of humans.

Guaranteed the old search box is still available to spooks and troon employees.

 

[Michael Jacks0n]

Now if you upload a photo of a person it'll pass it to its lobotomized AI and return "Human Male" and a bunch of stock photos of humans.

Bingo. As of last year or so each time I've tried to use reverse Google image search for detecting catfish accounts on Tinder, the return result is "girl", or some cases the result is the hair style she had followed by a bunch fashion articles about that hair style. For example, I upload an image of a redhead girl I saw on Tinder to see her if her Facebook's legit, and the only results are websites for shit like "10 top haircuts for redheads" or Pinterest pages for redhead hair styles. Zero results for the mystery girl's social media profiles.

 

[The Real SVP]

Google image search went from hashing the image and searching for locations of it, to some machine learning classifier BS. It would even work with cropped or scaled images, and find a higher quality version of the same image. Now if you upload a photo of a person it'll pass it to its lobotomized AI and return "Human Male" and a bunch of stock photos of humans.

Guaranteed the old search box is still available to spooks and troon employees.

Try Yandex for context aware image search.

 

[White Devil]

Bingo. As of last year or so each time I've tried to use reverse Google image search for detecting catfish accounts on Tinder, the return result is "girl", or some cases the result is the hair style she had followed by a bunch fashion articles about that hair style. For example, I upload an image of a redhead girl I saw on Tinder to see her if her Facebook's legit, and the only results are websites for shit like "10 top haircuts for redheads" or Pinterest pages for redhead hair styles. Zero results for the mystery girl's social media profiles.

I've used tineye to some success with this before but I don't know if it's fagified now too.

 

[ditto]

I've used tineye to some success with this before but I don't know if it's fagified now too.

Never had any success with Tineye unless the image is super common.